Dying wasn't on sixteen-year-old Riley Richardson's to-do list. And now, not only is she dead, but she's stuck in a perpetual high school nightmare. Worse still, she's stuck there with the geekiest, most annoying boy in the history of the world, ever.
In a school where the geeks are popular and just about everything is wrong, Riley has become an outcast. She begins a desperate quest to get back home, but her once-perfect life starts to unravel into something not nearly as great as she thought it was. And maybe death isn’t really that bad after all...
Welcome to Afterlife Academy, where horns are the norm, the microwave is more intelligent than the teachers, and the pumpkins have a taste for blood.
A free copy was given to me in exchange for an honest review.
Well, what can I say about Afterlife Academy? Unfortunately, not a lot of good things. I was part of the cover reveal tour, and I will give it credit and say that I still think it’s a rather nice cover. The premise for the book itself is interesting, too, making the afterlife seem like just another life, rather than the popular perception of the afterlife that Christianity has given us.
Unfortunately, the book itself falls apart almost immediately. Its biggest fault is the main character, Riley. She’s utterly unlikable. She’s a Mean Girl all the way through the novel, and she’s the worst kind, too, because she’s both unaware she’s one and thinks that what she does to other people is justified. Her excuse for relentlessly picking on Anthony is literally just “Well he enjoys math and science so obviously he’s brought it on himself.” She’s like this through the entire novel, so much so that it makes me wonder why Anthony forgives her for the horrible things she’s done, and why the headmistress, her roommate, and the half-demon lunch lady all say they “really like her,” with the lunch lady saying it right after they meet. What’s there to like?
As a side note, I will never understand why British English says “maths” instead of “math.” I understand it’s short for “mathematics” but it just sounds awkward to me. It might be a case of “say a word enough and it stops sounding like a word,” though. The word “maths” comes up so very much in this book because Riley spends so much time thinking about Anthony, mostly justifying her actions towards him in life.
The book is also inconsistent, which doesn’t help Riley’s case for being a good character. It starts right in the first sentence, in fact, with Riley saying she’s always been a good girl, and that of course the first time she does something bad, she dies. However, it’s clear she’s done a lot of bad things in her life, and even she’s aware of it; she says more than once that she cut class more than attended in life. So while she’s never gotten in a car with someone without a license and run someone over before the start of the book, she’s skipped class, given her parents more grief than most girls her age, and spent her free time doing things like stealing Anthony’s glasses and pasting the heads of people she and her friends don’t like on the bodies of porn stars and posting them online.
Another inconsistency is that Riley seems to make a major character development almost every chapter, but the thing is, it’s the same one. She’ll realize what a horrible person she was in life, either to Anthony or in general, and vow that she’ll be a better person, or at least try. But by the next chapter, or in extreme cases the very next paragraph, she’s right back to calling Anthony a geek and worrying what her friends would think if they could see her now. At some point she starts worrying that she’s in love with Anthony rather than her old boyfriend Wade, but it comes right out of left field amidst her still calling him a geek and failing to see why he even qualifies as a human being.
Tied in with this point is her wanting to escape Afterlife Academy. She spends the whole novel on it, first thinking that she and Wade are so connected that he just knows she’s there and will somehow break in despite everyone saying that no one alive knows about the place. When that doesn’t pan out, she tries to get expelled, despite being told that no one has ever been expelled because there’s no place for them to go- and there’s certainly no hint that if someone were to be expelled, they’d be brought back to life rather than being sent into limbo or something. I say this ties in with the previous point because, again, she makes realization after realization that she enjoys being at Afterlife Academy and thinks she wants to stay, and then in the next chapter, scene or paragraph, she’s right back to thinking Wade is going to save her or she’ll be able to find the rumored exit portal and go back to Earth.
The lesson she learns is pretty weak, too. Everything and everyone in the afterlife is grey (with a few exceptions like Narcissa’s horns and Caydi’s vampiric pumpkin) but parts of Riley are still colored and it supposedly makes her stand out. It’s mentioned in the context of wondering why she still has color and that’s about it, though. Riley’s bullied a grand total of once, but the only indication that she can’t make friends is that she’s still judgmental and, for instance, won’t even try asking someone else if she can sit with them in the dining hall. She says she learns what it’s like for someone she bullied in life and it makes her regret her actions, but again, the lesson never seems to stick and there’s little shown for why she actually knows this because barring the one mentioned instance, she’s pretty much brought the loneliness on herself.
All-in-all, the novel just doesn’t work. The author can’t seem to decide when things are supposed to happen, or even if Afterlife Academy is a good place or if this was supposed to be a dystopian-type novel. Combine this with a horrible main character, and it was just hard for me to care whether Riley adapts to (after)life there or gets out and reverses the accident that got her and Anthony there in the first place. Speaking of that, though, the ending is just as weak, rushed and unbelievable as every other plot point. It makes me sad that such an interesting concept wasn’t used in the kind of better, more effective way it deserves.
